Desktop Drama with Usability as a Talking Point
Steven Harms from Planet Ubuntu talks about the current drama between Linus and Gnome with KDE stuck in the middle. One of his opening comments (a conclusion I assume he drew not only from the article but from his personal experience) was that there is no such thing as usability.
He’s right. There really is no such thing as usability — it’s a single property of the user experience which has be marketed to death in both industry and opensource. It is an easily recognized word, so it’s used and misused all the time. It has become so popular and so recognizable that other disciplines have been trying to “own” usability to make themselves more marketable.
AFAIK Gnome doesn’t like referring to its interface as “dumbed-down”, but they’ve only done the easy part of taking the hard stuff out, not redesigning it to work better. As a result, their lack of functionality and options (which is another property of experience) makes them very attractive to newer users (I am not implying that Gnome is not suitable for more advanced users).
On the flip side, KDE is known to provide options and customizability, and has a right to expect newer users will have a higher learning curve which hopefully pays off. The DE runs in to trouble when they want to be as easy to learn as Gnome and grow with their users needs and expectations. This is one of many tricky problems the design world has been trying to solve for years (and so far we’ve only managed to create separate products, it turns out that “user levels” weren’t such a hot idea).
As infantile as a flame war may be, Linus has every right to submit patches to improve Gnome the way he wants it (he is fortunate in having that capacity), and Gnome has every right to reject them. That is the nature of open source. Is this drama high profile because it is a man against a project, or because it Linus against a Gnome? Regardless, it certainly makes for good media.
Hmm.. If he hates Gnome so much, why doesn’t he spend his time contributing to make KDE better instead? I get the feeling that Linus would really like to use Gnome, if it was only slightly different, or accepted patches.
Maybe it is because he is more comfortable hacking on their C codebase. Probably more similar to what he is used to working on.
Great minds think great things.. But when they brainfart, oh boy. Linus manages to both surprise and appall at the same time.
I don’t know about this removing options way of Gnome. I’m primarily a Gnome user and I really don’t notice missing any more advanced features. On top of that the GUI is far more aesthetic because it’s not cluttered with all sorts of things like a shuttle cockpit.
“… [GNOME's] lack of functionality and options (which is another property of experience) makes them very attractive to newer users …”
That’s debatable: programmers, sysadmins and the like won’t be troubled by having to edit config files by hand; non-technical people–”newer users”–would likely prefer a have a GUI for such things.
This is not merely a GNOME vs. KDE matter in any case. Compare matters on the Windows platform–specifically note how Microsoft’s Internet Explorer exposes many, many config options with a GUI. Now compare how Mozilla shuffles many of its options off into a config file whose very existence will escape many users. Likewise, Cupertino tends to go for clean interfaces: if you want to make Apple’s Mail.app display mail in plaintext by default, you have to drop into Terminal and write to defaults to do it. There is no option in the program’s GUI.
It seems more like:
KDE/Windows vs. Apple/GNOME/Mozilla
But it’s not even that at bottom: it’s people choosing different points on a continuum.
And I think GNOME’s approach (which, I suspect is influenced by Apple’s–it actually has HIG guidelines, like Apple, doesn’t it?) is less a matter of catering to this or that group of users as it is a taking of a certain attitude towards what a GUI should be like. The thought than some less-experienced users might be bewildered by more options is doubtless a part of it, but it’s not the whole story.
FWIW, I think GNOME has gone too far in that direction.
That about sums it up. Many people are thinking that Linus is simply having a go because he dislikes Gnome, but he would be saying the same thing about KDE or anything else. There is no such thing as usability (and the word usable by definition means that people can use it) and there are no such things as ordinary or power users either.
The problem is that the issue of who your users are is not as simple as Gnome as a project is making out. “A desktop for human beings” type strap lines, and the dreaded ‘intuitive’, ‘clean’, ‘cluttered’ and ‘polish’ words that show up sound like good soundbites, but it doesn’t help anyone. The fact is, that desktops are used by office workers, and they are supported by administrators, help desk people and others, and the desktop needs to help those people help others get their work done. These office workers, administrators and help desk workers will, at any given time, use features of their desktop that they perhaps don’t use very often, but are important none the less and can’t just be ignored. That’s why user levels are a bad idea, because the whole thing is heterogeneous.
You’d also be surprised how many ‘ordinary users’ do customise their desktop with different themes, colours, fonts and how many people switch their cursor theme to that cute, girly dinosaur thing. Yet, Gnome still does not provide a means for adequately previewing a desktop theme and any customisations made to it before it is applied, like KDE and every other major desktop does. In terms of Unix desktops, many Windows and Mac users have become interested in Unix desktops, even CDE, because you can actually make the middle mouse button do something.
After all, if open source desktops are only offering a desktop environment that is limited in features against Windows and Mac OS, where’s the incentive?